Judge doubted NSA’s value

NSA's Utah Data Center is shown in June. Newly declassified documents released tell a story of a surveillance apparatus so unwieldy and complex that nobody fully comprehended it. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Judge doubted NSA program's value

A federal judge overseeing U.S. surveillance programs raised doubts in the spring of 2009 about whether the massive, secret collection of Americans' daily phone calls was all that important to protecting the country from terrorists.Newly declassified records show that four years before the American public would learn that the National Security Agency had created a vast database of all its phone calls, a conservative jurist with detailed knowledge of the program was far from convinced that it led to the …